"Why Kerry is Flat Wrong on Climate Change"
is the title of today's WSJ rebuttal by two professors of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and fellows of the American Meteorological Society, both members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

Take this chart comparing the AGWA's dire predictions vs reality, for example:

Read the whole thing at http://tinyurl.com/kxy24xh . Its bottom line is that the AGWAlarmists must stop lying about the data just to support their ideologically desired outcomes.

Climate change is a lot like the elephant--it's somewhat different every place you look. If you look only at surface temperatures, you don't see a lot of change recently, but an increase of over 1 degree since we've been keeping track. If you are a farmer growing crops, you know that budbreak is about 2 to 3 weeks earlier most years. If you're a flood control engineer, you know that the frequency curves you've been using for decades aren't accurate because that one in 100 year storm keeps happening about every 15 years. If you are a coastal engineer, you know that sea level rise has accelerated in enough places to scare you. If you are an oceanographer, you know that the heat that the deniers can't find in surface temperatures is accumulating in the deep ocean--along with levels of acidification that threatens the end of ecology as we know it. And if you are a hurricane specialist, or one of the technical people who work on predicting weather, you know that heat drives all weather, but not necessarily in ways that we can predict with the modeling tools we have. And if you are a windsurfer who subscribes to iwindsurf, you know that models are better than they were twenty years ago--but they are still wrong some time. You generally also know that heat drives the weather patterns that we enjoy.

So deniers are a lot like the guys who grabbed hold of the elephants tail. Now they aren't blind, they just have their eyes screwed real tight. They are absolutely sure that something's shitty in their world, but they know a rope when they feel one. They heard a scientist suggest that they open their eyes--but he's from the gub'mint and can't be trusted.

Just as a postcript, it is my experience that people who approach life as if everyone from the government is lying--is none too honest, and projects that behavior onto others.

I'll leave the citations until tomorrow. The heat stuff is pretty simple--8th grade general science--if you were paying attention.

Its bottom line is that the AGWAlarmists must stop lying about the data just to support their ideologically desired outcomes.

The authors of the article do not say that anyone is lying about the data. They do admit "The two fundamental facts are that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased due to the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat before it can escape into space.” and "What is not a known fact is by how much the Earth's atmosphere will warm in response to this added carbon dioxide.”

Their quarrel is with the predictions made by climate models, which they say overestimate the rate of temperature change. They acknowledge the difficulty of modeling the climate "The rate of warming forecast by these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans."

The chart they provide shows the failure of the models to predict atmospheric warming "global mid-tropospheric temperature five year averages", it does not deal with the matter of heat uptake by the oceans,
which could have had a greater effect on atmospheric warming than the models predict. Or, it could be that natural variabilty is masking the trend "The modelers insist that they are unlucky because natural temperature variability is masking the real warming. They might be right..." McNider and Christy don't think that's the case, but rather than examining the data and making a statistical argument, they make a baseball analogy "...when a batter goes 0 for 10, he's better off questioning his swing than blaming the umpire."

The problem is, the climate system is complex and the data sets we have are noisy, and rather sparse, given the size of the planet. What we need is to directly measure the albedo of the earth (the ratio of the light reflected by the earth to the total amount that falls on the earth), and correlate changes of albedo to changes in atmospheric CO2. Fortunately, in early 2015 NASA is scheduled to launch the DSCOVR satellite, which is in fact designed to measure the earth's albedo. Sadly, this satellite was scheduled to be launched in 2003, but it was pulled from the launch schedule, and put into storage until Nov. 2008, when it was decided to go ahead with the mission. We've lost 10 years of data that would give us a much better picture of what's going on.

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